And yet there are millions of people using the Internet and we have to protect them with the army we have. I hope we'll see something like Marlinspike's Notaries becoming widespread in our lifetime, though.
I think the solution is to formally verify your hardware with a prover that is aware of electromagnetic forces. Software has to assume correctness of hardware (rad-hard applications have to assume ridiculous hardware faults are possible, but that's to prevent solar flares from corrupting firmware, not Rowhammer).
Thought experiment; you are some sort of intrusion prevention system. You've detected that your hardware is untrustworthy. Now what?
> Extortion in the form of ransom-ware, theft in the form of stealing bitcoin from exchanges. (Mt. Gox, and a more recent case.)
This is exactly what I meant. I guess I could have been more clear about that.
I don't have any data to back the assertion, and honestly I kind of forgot the markets were still extant, I just happen to know that people are making millions in illicit profits from these two methods, and I've never heard of a successful preminer (which was how I interpreted "Ponzi scheme") other than Mr. Nakamoto.
People are scammed out dollars, bitcoins, and iTunes gift cards. Ponzi schemes happen everywhere. The real money in bitcoin-denominated crime is in theft and extortion anyway.
Regarding your first point, the trouble (at least in this instance) is that this logic doesn't apply when you're looking for Roger Waters and calling everyone in the phone book with his name. Each time someone picks up the phone it probably won't be the person you're looking for, but you certainly had reason to believe they could be.
They didn't find a strange phenomenon and point out it might be ETI, in which case you're right, the hypothesis wouldn't make sense until you had ruled out basically everything else. They made a hypothesis about what ETI would look like, looked for it, and claim to have found things that could fit the bill.
The correct answer would have been to pick a reasonable assumption (before you ask, your own judgement determines what is reasonable) for what "useful" is, and to clarify that that was the assumption you were using.
We don't have to question whether or not anything means anything in order to engage with every topic every time, but I appreciate the exercise.
Extraordinary claims don't require more evidence than other claims. A more accurate statement would be, "claims I'm skeptical of will require convincing evidence for me to be swayed." The "extraordinary" part makes this razor less useful, as if there were more than one category of evidence and one of them simply wasn't good enough for you.
Comey continues to advocate for backdoors in order to stop ISIS from being able to radicalize marginalized people within the US without them being able to listen. However, there are two obvious problems with this.
1. Why don't you just reach out to the marginalized yourself? Spend that $1M you paid to break into an iPhone on combatting Islamphobia and ISIS will have a tougher job.
2. What is to stop ISIS from using software written outside the US, or software they write themselves, or versions of software older than the mandated backdoors, or open-source software, or... on and on and on. His plan transparently will not work. To quote Schneier, "His problem isn't encryption, it's general purpose computers and a global market for software."
I agree, I never meant to imply that I thought contractors were less loyal. I appreciate the depth of your responses and hope I haven't given offense.
There are just so many of them that it projects the attack surface of the DoD out; now you can attack contractors which aren't as tightly regulated, and they might hire people to, say, build their website that aren't even cleared. So now I can steal some web dev's credentials and pivot towards classified networks.